Bullet holes and budget rock: Talking shop with Smoke Eaters

Smoke Eaters kick it after their show at Copper Owl. Photo by Michelle Yun, Contributing Writer

Fresh off their summer tour, Victoria-based indie rock group Smoke Eaters are keeping themselves busy. Bonnybrook Road, their latest full-length album, is nostalgic and summery, a collection of feel-good songs with equally jaunty lyrics. I got the chance to talk to Misha, Leigh, Rodney, and David, the four members of the band, in their cozy tour van before a show at the Copper Owl on Jan. 19.

The Martlet: How did you all meet and how did you decide to start playing music together?

Misha: Me and David actually met on a dating site, he was posing as an older woman —

David: Catfished.

Misha: — and then we just became really good friends friends from that . . . Rodney and David were actually friends before.

David: Rodney and I met in kindergarten. We celebrated our 20-year friendiversary this fall.

Misha: Well, as far as Smoke Eaters’ records go, we all record and make music. Most of the records were conceived in different ways. It’s usually quite experimental. There’s not really much [of a] formula to it.

Rodney: And as new people join the band, I feel that songs tends to change a bit.

Is there a member who does most of the songwriting?

David: That would be Misha.

Misha: That would be me. I do all of it. James used to do half of it, but he moved away to Saskatchewan.

David: Really? Saskatchewan?

Misha: Yeah, Saskatoon. He’s an engineer now.

Leigh: Yeah, he realized that deep down, where he really wanted to be was the prairies.

Your album Bonnybrook Road was recorded in the small towns Ymir [pronounced why-mer] and Bonnybrook. Do you think your music is influenced by small-town vibes?

Misha: Bonnybrook is not a small town, it’s a road in Calgary. [The album] was recorded in Calgary and finished in Ymir. It was actually mastered in this van while we were driving to Edmonton.

David: Ymir’s a beautiful little town.

Leigh: It’s full of dogs and people.

Misha: Yeah, no matter where you go, there’s dogs and kids running around. It’s really strange . . . [Ymir] does inspire me to work on music —and relax, mostly — but I think Bonnybrook Road was mostly influenced by travelling and living in a big city. I lived in Vancouver when we started recording it, and we finished it in Calgary.

Looking through your albums on Bandcamp, I noticed they’re all tagged “garbage pop.” What does that mean for you guys?

Misha: It’s more of a self-hating thing. I don’t really stand true with it, but it just happened. I think our music automatically gets tagged with that now on Bandcamp . . . We should probably change that.

David: We’re more of a budget-rock group.

Misha: It’s like top 40 music played by 11-year-olds.

You filmed/directed/produced your own music video for the song “Mopeds.” What was that process like?

Leigh: Misha had a dream one night and he wrote it down in his sketchbook. He brought it to us and told us he’d had a dream.

David: Misha actually is a collector of moped bikes. He’s got a bunch of ‘em.